Calling violence
Essay by Jakob Wunderwald
The Belarusian actor and artist Igor Shugaleev presents «375 0908 2334. The body you are calling is currently not available» at this year's Theater Spektakel. With this activist performance, he wants to tell of the trauma of the manipulated elections in 2020 and the subsequent brutally suppressed protests in Belarus. He embarks on a search for the possibilities of art following the failure of a revolution. A classification by author and Slavic studies researcher Jakob Wunderwald.
«375 0908 2334». With a telephone number, Igor Shugaleev's performance tells of the shattering of Belarus’ reality. 9 August 2020 marks the day and year of the rigged presidential elections («0908»), the moment from which Belarus could no longer be represented by the prefix «375» but by «2334», the numbers referring to the article in the penal code that was central to the suppression of the protests. State violence instead of availability: the baton takes over.
The protests in Belarus had been building up for months. Their origins lay in the government's disinterested response to the corona pandemic and the increasingly authoritarian reaction to the rising discontent among the population, which culminated in the arrest of the two opposition candidates Sjarhej Cichanoǔski and Wiktar Babaryka. Even before the elections, tens of thousands of people flocked to the campaign rallies of the three candidates led by the independent civil rights activist Svyatlana Cichanoǔskaya. However, the election on 9 August 2020 ended like every election in Belarus since the 1990s: According to the official final results, over 80 per cent of the votes went to incumbent Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The falsification of the election results, obvious to many people in Belarus, triggered night-long protests that were brutally suppressed by the police. This was followed by months of peaceful demonstrations, often led by women, which the regime countered with increasingly escalating brutality. To this day, thousands of political prisoners are held in the country's jails. The government, backed by a rampant security apparatus, firmly holds the reins. The protests seem to have failed.
This defeat of the protests marks a rupture in the biographies of many Belarusians. Before, a step-by-step transition to a freer future was conceivable; a gradual liberalisation of the country; a steady struggle for newfound freedom by an active civil society. Minsk in the 2010s, for example, was a place where new cultural spaces were opening constantly, where an independent theatre scene was developing, where every evening there was a performance, a reading, a rave to attend, where «something was going on». A big European city where everyone knew about the political restrictions to one's freedom, but at the same time there was a feeling in the air that these restrictions were part of a bygone world.
Meanwhile, the future was negotiated in the cultural centre Korpus, on the stage of the experimental theatre OK16 (financed by the imprisoned candidate Babaryka) or in the Ў Gallery. Even at the state-run Janka Kupala National Theatre, the largest Belarusian stage in the country, there were exciting things to see: Under the leadership of artistic director Mikalaj Pinigin, productions were staged in search of a Belarusian identity that did not necessarily conform to the identity dictated by the state. The stirring final images in Pinigin's reinterpretations of plays long banned from the stages in Soviet times (such as Janka Kupala's «Tutejšyja») opened up a space of possibility in the centre of the capital. The stage became a model of a future, freer society, in which the classic works of Belarusian literature could be given their true meaning – as the basis for the self-assertion of a nation in a double process of emancipation: resistance against the dictatorship and against the imperial claims of the more powerful neighbours.
August 2020 revealed that those hopes were premature. Violence had not been overcome, but was the defining element of a new present. First police excesses and torture in prisons, then waves of arrests that eliminated more and more members of the still vibrant civil society over a period of months. Many Belarusians working in the cultural sector, who had previously been able to balance between jobs in the official cultural sector and their own projects in the independent scene, had to give up this way of life: Cooperation with the regime had become impossible. A good part of the members of this generation of artists now find themselves in exile in various countries in Western Europe and are faced with the task of reflecting on what happened. They have to come to terms with the experience of violence, find a way to deal with their own failure – they have to learn what art could be in the new reality. How to tell about the violence, the traumas, the destroyed hopes and perhaps also find new ways.
This applies, for example, to the theatre group Kupalaǔcy. It consists of the majority of the former ensemble members of the Janka Kupala National Theatre, who left the theatre in protest in the summer of 2020. The group continues the theatre's programme on tours through Europe and in YouTube performances. The aim is still to test another Belarusian identity, now with the awareness of what has happened. Productions of Orwell's «1984» or «Fear» after Bertold Brecht are dedicated to the experience of violence and the feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with the new reality. In London, the Belarus Free Theatre, which has been working in exile for some time, is staging Alhierd Bacharevič's dystopian novel «Dogs of Europe», which deals with the speechlessness of the colonised. The play depicts Belarus and hits home: Bacharevič's text is now considered «extremist material» in Belarus, and, as the author has learned, an entire edition was buried with the help of tractors. Thanks to theatre in exile, he can still work – working abroad means that the conversation about the past and the possible cannot be shut down by the state.
Igor Shugaleev's performance, on the other hand, goes to the heart of all this violence. The artist kneels in front of the audience in the pose that arrested demonstrators have to assume for hours. He wants to tell what violence does to its victim and in doing so reverses the equation: Endurance as a sign of strength. By confronting violence, the artist is not entirely defeated by violence but can withstand it. Shugaleev appropriates the mechanisms of the repressive apparatus and thus offers resistance. Repression is dispelled by its debunking display on stage. The telephone number changes its meaning – violence is called in order to confront it: back to the summer of 2020, to its worst moments. May they not have been in vain.
Igor Shugaleev performs «375 0908 2334. The body you are calling is currently not available» on 30 August 2022 at the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.